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Heraclitus
Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535 – c. 475 BCE) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom. From the lonely life he led, and still more from the riddling and paradoxical nature of his philosophy and his stress upon the needless unconsciousness of humankind, he was called "The Obscure" and the "Weeping Philosopher". Heraclitus is famous for his insistence on ever-present change in the universe, as stated in the famous saying, "No man ever steps in the same river twice". He believed in the unity of opposites, stating that "the path up and down are one and the same", all existing entities being characterized by pairs of contrary properties. His cryptic utterance that "all entities come to be in accordance with this Logos" (literally, "word", "reason", or "account") has been the subject of numerous interpretations. Tossup Questions # In the Platonic dialogue named after a disciple of this man, the title character renounces speech in favor of finger wagging because he's convinced words aren't reliable; that disciple was Cratylus. This Greek philosopher was a strong proponent of dialectical monism, partially due to his belief that up and down were the same. This man was characterized by some of his contemporaries as "the weeping philosopher." This philosopher considered fire to be the most fundamental element. He was the first philosopher to deal seriously with the concept of logos, and his philosophy of change can be summed up by the aphorism panta rhei, or "everything flows." For 10 points, who is this Greek philosopher who is perhaps best known for saying that a man can't step in the same river twice? # This thinker attacked his predecessors by claiming that Homer should be beaten and that Pythagoras was a swindler. He held that thinking was common to all things, and a scholarly debate exists over whether or not he thought that the psyches of the best men were immortal. This thinker argued that contraries are co-present in objects, using the example of "the bow and the lyre," in his doctrine of Unity of Opposites. This man proposed that the world was driven by logos, and he argued for another doctrine that was at odds with the main theory of Parmenides. For 10 points, name this philosopher who argued that the world was in a state of eternal flux, claimed that fire was the basic element, and supposedly said that you cannot step into the same river twice. # Though Pythagoras may have coined the word "kosmos", this man was the first to use it in any extant text, and he claimed the universe had a fundamental unity he termed "logos." He expressed the intrinsic similarity in being asleep and awake in his "unity of opposites" theory. Only one of this philosopher's works, "On Nature", survives, in which he argued that all existence was in flux, being constantly formed from or destroyed by fire, which he posited was the fundamental substance. For 10 points, name this ancient philosopher, known for positing that one cannot step into the same river twice.